- British hill sheep in trouble.
- Canadian maple syrup in trouble.
- Fruits good for you.
- Native urban plants in trouble. How many crop wild relatives among them?
- “If the world learned to feed itself half a century ago, why are there now more hungry people than ever before?” Er … I dunno. Either-orism?
- “Almost all of the 300 experts at a two-day food forum in Rome this week agreed that between them they had all the answers to how to feed the world in 2050, but doubted they would have the political support to do it.” Alert the media!
- “Erosion of Crop Diversity Worrying“. Malawian plant breeder speaks.
- British wildflowers in trouble, prince says? How many crop wild relatives among them? Does prince know? Care?
- Indian crops in trouble.
More from IIED on landraces and climate change
Jeremy took IIED researchers to task a few days ago over their antipathy to GURTs, as articulated in a recent press release. One of the researchers quoted in that release, Krystyna Swiderska, is now the subject of an interview. GURTs don’t come up, but Dr Swiderska is clearly not completely against GMOs in principle:
If GM crops were produced with the people who need them and who will plant them, and they are specifically addressing their needs, then maybe they can be helpful.
Her main concern is to safeguard the rights of farmers.
We need to recognize farmers’ rights to maintain genetic diversity. We also need to protect land rights, cultural and spiritual values, and customary laws. Traditional knowledge is dependent on genetic diversity and vice versa and those two are dependent on farmers having rights to land and plant varieties.
Asked if traditional farmers could feed rising populations in a warming world, she points out that “there are technologies based on traditional seed varieties that can increase yields.” These technologies mainly turn out to be participatory plant breeding. I would have liked to see more discussion of this topic.
I’ll try to follow up on some work on genetic erosion I was not aware of:
Our research on rice in India’s eastern Himalayas, on potatoes in the Peruvian Andes, and on maize in southwest China, found significant reductions of traditional varieties in the last 10 to 20 years. There used to be 30 to 40 varieties of a crop being planted but now there are maybe 5 to 10 varieties.
Nibbles: Prosopis as food, Chickpea delicacy, Livestock genetic erosion in Kashmir, Pholisma
- Making mesquite pancakes.
- The origin of hummus.
- “But militants on the one side and security forces on the other shot dead these dogs as they set off alarms at every movement. Now we are hardly left with any dogs.”
- “Sand food” is endangered, apparently.
Indications of failure
A group of over 20 biodiversity experts from a slew of international conservation agencies have a paper out in Science bemoaning the state of the biodiversity indicators agreed in 2006. 1 These indicators are important because they are supposed to be used to track progress towards fulfillment of the promise made by Parties under the Convention on Biological Diversity to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. They have also been incorporated into the Millennium Development Goals.
The authors point to problems with the “availability, consistency, and relevance” of data on even the indicators that are reasonably well-developed at the global scale. Some indicators — 5 of the 22 — “are not being developed at a global scale” at all, such as the one on access and benefit sharing. 2 The next Conference of the Parties of the CBD (which meets in Japan in October 2010) “will review progress and agree on a new set of targets and a revised indicator framework.”
I hope one of the things it will consider in the new set of targets is crop genetic erosion. There are currently two indicators under the “Trends in genetic erosion” rubric, covering ex situ crop collections and livestock diversity respectively. Here’s what the indicators website has to say about the ex situ collections indicator:
Currently, studies are being undertaken to measure the dynamics of genetic diversity of collections from selected genebanks (EURISCO, USDA, SINGER, ICRISAT and CIAT), in order to develop a model to be applied more systematically worldwide. Based on data from these sources, the evolution over time in quantitative and qualitative terms (number of species; number of accessions/species; geographic origin and distribution of newly added accession versus existing ones) of collected samples was investigated.
I’m ashamed to say I know no more about it than that, but will try to find out the latest. Or maybe someone out there can bring us up to date. Anyway, there is no indicator that I can see on trend of genetic diversity in farmers’ fields, although there is one on sustainable management of agroecosystems.
We all know this is a fraught subject, not least politically, and we should perhaps be grateful that there is anything at all on agrobiodiversity among the indicators 3, but we cannot go on quoting at best anecdotal, at worst dubious, figures on loss of crop diversity and expect to be taken seriously. To say, as the authors of the Science paper do, that
…indicators of genetic biodiversity are slowly being compiled for domesticated and cultivated varieties but not yet for wild relatives.
is frankly not hugely reassuring.
Nibbles: Légumes oubliés, Mazes, Poultry, Business, Roquefort, Herb, Evolution, Benin, Egyptian pigs, New York food, Cabbage pest control, Cider making
- Francophones! Watch this. Report back.
- Geographers! Play with this. Global collection of crop mazes.
- Chicken fanciers and development officers! Read this (pdf). Increase assets, income and nutrition.
- Agro-business! Respond to this. Please.
- Cheese lovers! Watch this. Salivate.
- Chemists! Find out why Teucrium tastes like apple. Or is it that apple tastes like Teucrium?
- Females! Why are you horny?
- Farmers! Get information to adapt to climate change.
- Egyptian pig cull! Bad. No, good. No, bad…
- Brooklynites! Wallow in ethnic cuisine.
- Africans! Why bother with cabbage when you have so many much more interesting leafy greens?
- Scrumpers! Get thee to Eden!